faith

“Mother(s) of God!” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 8 December 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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When I got sober, I became friends with loads of people I had nothing in common with. Except we all shared the same addiction, and – though it seemed impossible to me at the time – we’d all found the same solution in the rooms of recovery.

One of those friends is someone I’ll call Mary. She was in her sixties at the time, worked a thankless job, but as a side-hustle she was trying to start a yoga studio. I don’t know your stereotype of a yoga teacher, but I’m certain Mary isn’t it. Cantankerous, uptight, a wonderfully-outrageous cusser – not a “namaste” on her lips – and a chain-smoker. So, unsurprisingly, her yoga studio was going nowhere. It felt impossible, and she was really down about it.

There’s another Mary I’m thinking about – who’s famous in Christianity for being the mother of Jesus. Nine months before this Mary starred in the first nativity, an angel flew through her window one day while she was doing Wordle and asked her to birth God into the world. That’s basically how the Bible tells it. Mary says: “that’s impossible, look at me: I’m no-one’s stereotype for the mother of God”. The angel says: “Nothing’s impossible with God”. And Mary says: “Well, then, let it be”.

The other Mary, after a year trying to birth her yoga studio, she gave up. Soon after her friend’s husband had a massive stroke that left him half-paralyzed and unable to speak. Mary visited them in hospital and her friend said: “Maybe you could try some yoga with him?” She was reluctant but helped him breathe deeply and stretch for the first time in months.

He was really quiet, and Mary was really self-conscious. After a while she said: “This must be so boring for you – you’d probably like to stop”. He shook his head, started to tear up, and lifted his hand to his heart in gratitude.

And that was the beginning of Mary’s unexpected yoga studio: wounded people, recovering people in rehabs and hospitals, experiencing the grace of their bodies – led by a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking alcoholic who didn’t look like a yoga teacher, but absolutely was one, because nothing is impossible with God.

The 13th-century theologian Meister Eckhart said: “We are all meant to be mothers of God, because God is always needing to be born”. Not just with the Marys — but in all of us. And I’ve come to believe that the people who think “that’s impossible — it can’t be me!” are the very ones God chooses to bring love into the world.

“We are, all of us, pilgrims” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 24 November 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

Last year we moved to the Docklands – part of the East End of London, that from medieval times was the world’s largest port. Boats moved cargo in and out of vast docks along the Thames.

Today most of these harbors have been filled in to create parks and housing, but you can still sense the history in the names of things. We live on the old whaling dock, and our local pub? It’s called the Moby Dick — with some of the best fish-and-chips in-town.

I was exploring the neighborhood one day at low-tide and noticed a stretch of sand and pebble. And a memorial to a voyage that started there in 1620, when 65 people boarded a ship sailing for what Europeans then called the New World. Need a hint? The pub next-door – it’s called the Mayflower.

This week, at Thanksgiving celebrations across the US, Americans will tell this story: of the Pilgrim mothers and fathers braving the seas for a new life, for a new home. Half of them perishing the first winter; the others surviving only through the compassion of the indigenous Americans, of the Wampanoag Nation.

This story is so central to American lore that we often romanticize the Pilgrims as heroic pioneers – or we stereotype them as colonial oppressors. I confess I’ve done both in my life. It’s so easy, but so lazy, to turn people from centuries ago into cartoons or villains.

But standing there on Rotherhithe Beach, I could see them as humans — children clinging to their parents as anchors lifted, prayers being whispered: for a safer life, for economic stability, for freedom to practice their faith without social hostility or government interference. These prayers feel to me like deeply human desires, both 400 years ago, and today.

We like our stories neat: good-or-bad, all-or-nothing. But real humans aren’t that simple: we’re a mixture of motives. We move, we migrate. We don’t stay in one place emotionally, or spiritually, or geographically. We change. As I stood on the pilgrims’ wharf that day, I heard people speaking in at least four different languages, and only one of them was Cockney. And I thought: we humans, we are all of us pilgrims.

In the Bible, I believe God makes a promise: “Let no foreigner say, ‘I am not welcome.’” God says “I will give them a home and a name better than ‘daughters and sons’”.

It’s a promise of belonging that flows across generations and nations and borders. My prayer this Thanksgiving is that God’s vision will happen here: on earth as it already is in heaven. Because in the end, I believe we are, all of us, pilgrims searching for the belonging of home.

“The Sea in my veins” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 17 November 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

We’re recently back from a week in Norfolk, on a stretch of the coast so beautiful it could be a scene in a holiday snow-globe. Except instead of snow, stars and sunrises, seascapes and fields. And at this time of year, massive colonies of seals. Everything held together in an atmosphere of awe.

On the first morning, I ran along the dunes to see the grey seals, mottled and crooning on the sand, waiting for their babies to be born. That day I saw only one little white pup, maybe the first-fresh-born, held close by its mum.

But every day after that, there was growing crèche of cottony seal-babies. 125 by week’s end, with 3000 expected by January. I’d stop and gaze at the sheer exuberance of nature. So bold and, at the same time, so fragile: 40% of those babies won’t make it through winter. So terrible, so beautiful, so compelling that you half-expect David Attenborough to show up with a camera crew.

And Norfolk absorbed me in another way, too. Amidst all this new animal life were quiet reminders of human life and mortality. Walking the coastal path, stopping in seaside villages, I saw memorials everywhere. Names carved into monuments: young men, women, a generation, we will remember them. And simple plaques at beachfronts, on benches tied with flowers, giving thanks for loved ones who’ve crossed to the other shore.

For Nigel, who loved it here.

In memory of Mum, we miss you so much.

For Aisha, we’ll love you forever.

One of my favourite Bible passages is Psalm 148, which describes all Creation praising God—not just humans, but sun and moon, children and elders, sea creatures and ocean depths. All week-long in Norfolk, I felt drawn into this tidal movement of praise. I felt baptized again in the currents of the living and the dead. As the poet Thomas Traherne put it, I “felt the Sea itself flowing in [my] veins”.

For me, as a Christian, the reason for all this praise isn’t that everything is amazing all the time – it’s definitely not. For me, the reason for the praise is that God can be trusted to hold us together through terrible things and beautiful things. To hold everything together, actually: eons and generations, and me and you, and colonies of seal-pups, too. God somehow makes sure everything belongs.

In this cosmic sphere, we will live and we will die, and, I believe, we will be okay. All shall be well, everything held forever by the one God and Mother of us all.

“God is infinitely knowable” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 29 September 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Sara Cox on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

My friend Kimberly is one of my best mates in the whole world. But we didn’t start out that way. We met 30 years ago in theology college — also known as ‘vicar school’ — and immediately got off to a rocky start. We were both committed Christians, of course, but I was a lefty, she was a righty, and ‘never the twain shall meet’.

We also had serious personality differences. She was a sorority girl: popular, fiercely-intelligent, super-confident. I was confident too (also known as egotistical) but saw myself as more “cutting-edge”. I had long hair. I wore earrings, a big wooden cross around my neck, and t-shirts with messages like “No one knew I was a lesbian until now”.

Our competition and mutual-suspicion were thinly-veiled. Classic rival stuff, which came to a head one day when I told Kimberly I was one of two final candidates for a youth-worker job at a local church. She grimaced and said: “What do you know? I’m the other candidate.”

And then came the twist – the church hired us both, asked us to share the job. At first, we didn’t love it. But over the next two years, something unexpected happened. Our disagreements and resentments slowly melted into respect. And then into true, abiding friendship.

Thirty years later, we’ve never lived in the same city again and we now live in different countries. But emotionally we’re so near: we talk and text, we holiday together, we’ve written the other’s dating profiles in the past, officiated at each other’s weddings. Her boys are our God-children. We’ve been friends for so long that Kimberly knows the depths of me as well as (maybe better than) my husband.

Because of our friendship, our philosophies and theologies have grown – they’re less reactive, healthier, more mature. But more importantly we’ve realised that one of most beautiful things that faith makes possible is deep friendship in which we’re loved well and known in detail, across difference.

That feels so important – especially these days, when it’s easy to get locked-up in echo-chambers and view the other as an eternal opponent or enemy.

For me, though, it’s not only about friendship with each other, with other human-beings: it’s also about friendship with God.

Someone in my 12-step-recovery-meeting recently said: “It’s not that God is unknowable: it’s that God is infinitely knowable. Like a friend.”

I love that. In my opinion, God’s mystery isn’t about being distant or unknowable.

God’s mystery is simply that there is so much of God to know.

Not far-off, but endlessly-discoverable – like Kimberly, like a dear, unexpected friend.

“The Best Definition of Heaven” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 15 September 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Sara Cox on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

I am a shameless eavesdropper. Partly because I’ve got good hearing. Partly because I’m just plain nosey. But mostly because I’m genuinely interested in human beings. We are fascinating creatures.

And you can learn so much about us just by listening to what’s happening around you.

For example, I ran by a woman in Greenwich the other day, and I heard her say into her phone: “Why, Linda, why? Why did we let that happen, Linda?” (I thought, Lord, we’ve all been Linda).

Another day last week, two guys were getting off the train, and one said to the other: “They’re all being idiots! Every last one of them. And that’s exactly what I explained to Helen in one of my many emails”. God bless Helen. We’ve all been there, too.

Listening to people isn’t just a hobby of mine, it’s a calling. It’s what makes me a decent evangelist. Now I know – “evangelist” is a weird word with a complicated history. I remember walking in a Gay Pride parade in uni and being yelled at by so-called evangelists with Bible-verse placards, screeching that we would burn in hell.

For me, being an evangelist is the exact opposite of that kind of spiritual abuse. It’s listening for the good in the world, the kindness in people, the light shimmering through. When I notice those things and speak about those things, I can feel God moving.

In August I was at the Edinburgh Fringe interviewing stand-up-comics for my podcast, and I joined a group of Methodist evangelists at the Festival. Together we rolled a sofa-on-wheels up and down the Royal Mile and invited strangers to sit down and share a time when they were lost in wonder.

I thought we’d get a few extraverted-takers, but all week long, hundreds of people queued-up to be listened to, to sit down and tell stories – of falling in love, hearing music, losing a child or parent, seeing stars and signs and sensing the spirituality running through everything.

It was a sofa of miracles and I could have stayed there forever.

At one point, an elderly woman walked by. She was clearly caught up in the energy of the crowds, the thousands of Festival pilgrims. And I heard her whisper to herself: “My God! Everyone’s here.” I’m so glad I was eavesdropping, because honestly, that might be the best definition of heaven I’ve ever heard.

“My God! Everyone’s here!” In my opinion, that old woman was a true evangelist: listening for and speaking out the joy of human life and the goodness of God.

A Time for Every Purpose – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 9 June 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

I was at a baseball game one summer evening in 2006 when I got the call that my sister had given birth. My then-boyfriend and I were watching the Chicago Cubs play at Wrigley Field, alongside his parents, who were visiting from England.

I answered my mobile, and my dad yelled down the phone-line: Trey, you’ve got a niece and her name is Kenley!

I then yelled to my boyfriend, his parents, and all the folks around us we didn’t even know: I’ve got a niece! Her name is Kenley!

My boyfriend’s mom cried out: You’re an uncle!

And everybody cheered. The Cubs lost that night, but there was joy in the stands for a new life.

That baby niece is now 18-years-old. Kenley graduated high-school in May, she’s off to uni this autumn, and this week, she’s visiting me and my then-boyfriend-and-now-husband in London, before we travel to Rome for her graduation present. Kenley’s life is at the beginning, full of promise.

My then-boyfriend’s-mom who declared me an uncle at the Cubs game: she became my mother-in-law, Joy. And sadly, on Easter Sunday this year she received the unexpected diagnosis of advanced cancer. And last Bank Holiday, she died.

Kenley’s life is on the brink of opening into adulthood; Joy’s mortal life has ended, and opened, I believe, into the mystery of eternity.

There’s a line from the Bible, which was made into a famous song by the Byrds:

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:

a time to be born, a time to die,

a time to weep, a time to laugh,

a time to mourn, a time to dance.

What’s weird about this season for our family is that so many of those times and purposes are jumbled together in this moment: we’re packing holiday suitcases at same time as we’re ordering flowers for a funeral. We’re launching Kenley’s young adult life into the world now, at the same time as we’re offering Joy’s life to the world to come.

It’s really hard, and really bewildering. But also there’s so much beauty in this rise and fall of living and dying. Because I trust, as a Christian, that God somehow holds it all together – our young selves and old selves, our births and deaths, and everything in between.

I believe God knows us and loves us forever – and none of my seasons, or Joy’s or Kenley’s,  or yours, Scott – none of our seasons will ever be forgotten by God,

Spiritual Mudlarkers – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 7 April 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

I’m lucky to live just a few steps from the Thames Path – which for me, as a runner, is absolute heaven. Most days I unwind by covering some mileage between Tower Bridge and Greenwich.  

My favourite runs are when the tide’s out: when the edges of the riverbed are uncovered. I love watching people search the shore for treasure.  

It reminds me of childhood beach holidays, when I’d watch ordinary-explorers scanning their metal-detectors over the sand. I’d wonder what they expected to find – old pirate’s gold finally washed ashore? I’d only ever dug up bottle-tops and beer-cans. 

But on the shore of the Thames, a stone-turned-over could reveal actual treasure: a Victorian fork, a medieval ring, a rooftile from the Great Fire, maybe even a Roman jewel. Scavenging remnants from this river even has a special name. Mudlarking: scouring the debris and dirt for a glint of glory. 

I believe human-beings are spiritual mudlarkers. Religious or not, we’re on an elemental search: for hope in the midst of despair, rest in weariness, guidance in uncertainty. Maybe we still haven’t found what we’re looking for; maybe we’re not even sure what we’re looking for.  

Jesus says the kingdom of God is like a treasure hidden in a field, which someone finds – and then sells everything to buy that field. 

I get that, because I’m a mudlarker: scanning my spiritual-metal-detector over the ground of life, in search of that invaluable Something More. I feel like St Augustine, who prayed “God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless ‘til they find their rest in you.” His prayer’s been a treasure for me since I found it in dusty book, 1600 years old.

My husband and I just finished a wonderful BBC series called Detectorists. Written and directed by MacKenzie Crook, who stars alongside Toby Jones, it’s television gold. Each episode opens with a lyric sung by Johnny Flynn: “Will you search the loamy earth for me, climb through the briar and bramble? I will be your treasure: I’m waiting for you”. 

Sometimes, I think, we’re in spiritual-search-mode: we’re actively looking for wisdom, for God, for treasure, and that’s important. But when I hear Jesus and Johnny Flynn – I remember that we’re not only searchers; in my opinion we’re also the treasure being searched for.

And I believe God, the Great Mudlarker, has already found us. And has sold everything God has so we can feel the earthly, heavenly joy of being found. 

Conversations About a Dog Collar – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 31 March 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

St. Patrick’s Day was a fortnight ago, but I still have memories of childhood warnings: “if you don’t wear green, leprechauns will sneak up and pinch you!”

I’ve not had any leprechaun-issues lately, but I sometimes wear a piece-of-clothing that does attract attention. My clergy dog-collar – the white-strip-of-plastic around my neck that announces: “I’m a minister; come talk to me!”

And people do. I can’t tell you the number of women and men who’ve sidled up to me, with suggestive grins, and whispered: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

I guess we all have our types.

What I don’t love about wearing my collar is how people tidy themselves up around me, in false ways. Someone will cuss, for example, then apologise. I’m like, “Please. It doesn’t bother me. Jesus cusses in the Bible, so just talk like you talk”.

What I do love about wearing my collar is how strangers sometimes trust me with what-they’re-going-through. Their big questions about love, tragedy, life’s purpose. On the train recently someone asked me: does everything happen for a reason? I said: I think so, but the reason’s not always God: sometimes it’s a war-mongering dictator or the simple-fact that we humans can occasionally be muppets.

In addition to being a Christian minister, I love being a member of the 12-step-addiction-recovery-community. Together we wrestle with life’s challenges. As people of many faiths and none, we search for a sober spirituality. In Alcoholics-Anonymous, I don’t wear my dog-collar. I’m there as an addict-among-addicts, in need of help as much as I offer it.

The wisdom of 12-step-community says that our problem isn’t merely the stuff we’re addicted to – be it alcohol, edibles, porn, sex, shopping, our social-media-feed. Our problem is actually much deeper: it’s a spiritual problem, we believe, and to be healed, we need a spiritual solution: God, a Higher-Power.

But the genius of 12-step-community is that no specific-higher-power is mandated. We’re invited to discover the God-of-our-own-understanding, who might be found in Church or Sea-Swimming or Science or Solitude – or all of the above.

The only strong suggestion I’d offer for that divine treasure hunt, whether we’re addicts or not, is to choose a higher-power who isn’t an Old-Jackass, or a Violent-Tyrant, or a Sneaky-Leprechaun – because Lord knows those kinds of false-gods never helped anybody get free.

And if you’re searching for a loving, freeing God – but haven’t found them yet – don’t worry, you’re very welcome to borrow mine, for as long as you need.

New Every Morning – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 17 March 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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Last Christmas I visited my family in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. My sister Brooke said: “Trey, my Christmas present for you this year is: we’re going on a pilgrimage together ­­– to the tattoo parlor.”

Brooke is a tattoo veteran: it was her fifth time getting inked. I, however, was a virgin: under-the-needle for my very first time – though I hear once you start, you can’t stop.

I almost got tattoed at uni. Over the course of one term, I came out as gay, had a beautifully-weird God-encounter, and ­– despite my parents’ protests­ – I swerved from reading medicine to reading theology. I wanted to celebrate all that ­– but I couldn’t figure out a tattoo that’d do the trick. I thought maybe a cross, and a man-breaking-free-from-chains, and a rainbow flag, and a bible verse.

But that all felt a bit much, so I didn’t go through with it. Not then nor during any of the other rites of passage over the next three decades: kissing a boy for the first time, getting ordained, getting married (not to the first boy I kissed), getting sober, moving to Britain, and on and on.

I turn fifty this year. And Brooke said, “it’s time for your tattoo, and we’re going together”.

She celebrated 12 years cancer-free by getting a lyric inked on her arm ­– “measure in love” ­ from the musical RENT.

I decided on three different words, now permanent on my wrist:

new every morning

It’s a mantra I started praying when I got sober. A clue that the best life is in the present moment. “One day at a time” we say in 12-step-recovery. New every morning, new every minute, new every single breath.

It’s also part of a Bible verse that reads: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. God’s mercies never come to an end: they are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness, O God.”

That is a statement of trust … and especially radical because it’s in the biblical book of Lamentations, this long-list of personal suffering, global injustice, the break-down of integrity. Lamentations was inked 2600 years ago but still rings true today. Basically: Things are royally messed up, God, but new every morning is your love.

Given my personal tendency to mess up, I need that assurance. I wake up, I clean my teeth, I see my tattoo and I remember – not only that I am new every morning, but, more importantly, I believe, God’s love is. Permanent, eternal, tattooed onto my skin, into my heart. Inscribed forever into the life of every single thing.

Gratitude Lists – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 2 December 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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Last Thursday in America was Thanksgiving Day, when families and friends travel great distances simply to eat together. I love Thanksgiving because it’s not super-commercialized. It’s like Christmas, but without the price of entry. You don’t have to buy anybody anything. The only gift expected is sitting down for a common meal.

Which doesn’t always feel like a gift ­­– family dynamics can play out, especially this year when families, like mine, are divided by their votes in the recent election.

But Americans have developed a remedy for that, at least a temporary one: the practice of counting our blessings. It’s Thanksgiving tradition to go around the table, naming something we’re thankful for. Everybody participates, from your cantankerous-great-uncle to your fringy-cringy-cousin.        And also you.      It’s a beautiful thing.

The first year we lived in the UK, me and my English husband hosted Thanksgiving for our British friends. Jonathan cooked a turkey, prepared my grandma’s homemade-stuffing, baked a pumpkin-pie.

My contribution was inviting guests to express their thankfulness. The Brits didn’t see it coming. I said: As we tuck in, can everybody share a gratitude?

Immediately there were eye-rolls, a silent-but-visceral resistance. My friend Ash, a brilliant theologian but also a-bit-of-a-clown, said: How very American.

I said: Ash, it’s my party, let’s start with you: what are you thankful for? He responded in a Jack-Whitehall-kind-of-way: I’m thankful for these mashed potatoes.

Hannah, Ash’s wife, said: Ash, come on! And then she shared a sincere gratitude. And to my astonishment, everyone followed suit, offering thanksgiving for unexpected love, a clear diagnosis, a second chance. By the time we made it round the table, there were even a few tears for all the gratitude. Ash even made a second-attempt.

Of course, giving-thanks transcends national boundaries. And it’s the heart of many spiritual communities.

Christian writer Frederick Buechner says gratitude is about acknowledging the things we “can only be given” – things “we can’t bring about ourselves any more than we can bring about our own birth.”

In Alcoholics Anonymous, some folks write a gratitude list in the mornings. We find naming concrete things to be helpful: thanks for the breath in my lungs, for sobriety, for the coffee in my cup. Gratitude doesn’t fix our problems, but it does increase our freedom to take each day as it comes.

So whatever your country-of-origin, your spirituality or none: Happy Thanksgiving. May we count our blessings and be truly grateful.